Homage to great wanderers & restless minds

"Only those thoughts that come when you are walking have any value” (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

”Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling. Then, signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre. Paris taught me this art of straying...” (Benjamin, One-Way Street)

"In middle age Bob became increasingly eccentric. He dressed strangely, often slept with his clothes on and started to wander around on the streets all alone. He liked to explore socially backward parts of the city, especially ethnic areas where he wouldn't necessarily be recognized. He also prowled around in the wealthy areas of Los Angeles not far from where he was living. One day when Ted Perlman came back home to his house in San Fernando Valley he caught sight of what he thought was a bum sitting on the pavement. Perlman was about to ask him to leave when he realized it was Bob. 'I thought I should drop by and see you and Peggi.’ 'How long have you been sitting here?' Perlman asked. 'An hour and a half maybe. I've been looking around at the area', Bob replied" (Howard Sounes' Dylan biography)

“The world must be known through the legs and the genitals. Friends and lovers are the best media for learning about the world, something money cannot buy. It’s something you create with your lower half.” (Shimada Masahiko)

“It’s good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.” (Anatole France)


Here's to Cisco an' Sonny an' Leadbelly too,
An' to all the good people that traveled with you.
Walter Benjamin, Bob Dylan, Robert Musil, James Joyce, Murakami Haruki, Louis Aragon, Guy Debord, Charles Baudelaire, Jack Kerouac, Rimbaud, Socrates, and Chaplin.
The wanderer as media, the isôrô artist, the marebito, the outsider, the visiting stranger, the disappearing holy man. Yes, here's to your hearts and hands...
All ye who come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

Credits to the owners of the images & thanx to Eva (from whose refrigerator door I stole one of the quotations). And apologies to all you other great wonders & wanderers. I’m sorry for only mentioning celebrities. My homage goes via them to you.